Saint Dulce Lopes Pontes

Saint Dulce Lopes Pontes, known in Brazil as Irmã Dulce, that is, Sister Dulce, was a religious sister from Salvador in the state of Bahia who gave her whole life to the poor and the sick. Her memorial falls on August 13, the anniversary of the day in 1933 when she received the religious habit.

She was born on May 26, 1914, in Salvador and was baptized Maria Rita. She was the second of the five children of Augusto and Dulce Maria de Souza Brito Lopes Pontes. She lost her mother at an early age. When she was about sixteen, she began to take in poor children, adults and elderly people in the cellar of the family home, and she collected food, clothing, medicine and small sums of money for them from relatives and neighbors. While attending a teacher training school, she joined the Third Order of Saint Francis.

Right after receiving her diploma, on February 8, 1933, she entered the Congregation of the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God, which belongs to the Franciscan family. On August 15, 1934, she made her religious vows and took the name Dulce in memory of her mother. She completed a course in pharmacy and worked as a volunteer at the Spanish Sanatorium in Salvador. In the middle of the 1930s she founded the Workers’ Union of Saint Francis, the first Christian workers’ movement in the city, in 1937 the Workers’ Circle of Bahia, and in 1939 a school for workers and their children.

Also in 1939 she began to place sick people from the streets in abandoned houses, from which they were evicted. In 1949 her superior allowed her to take in seventy sick people in an adapted chicken coop beside the convent. From that place the whole work developed: in 1959 the association Obras Sociais Irmã Dulce was founded, in 1960 a shelter was opened, and on February 8, 1983, the Saint Anthony Hospital, which the people of Bahia called Sister Dulce’s miracle. In 1988 the President of Brazil nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize.

She used to say of her ministry that the work of giving leads us to forget ourselves and to live the life of our brothers. In the poor she saw the suffering face of Christ. In 1979 she met Mother Teresa of Calcutta in Salvador, and a year later Pope John Paul II. The last years of her life were marked by serious illness. In October 1991 John Paul II, visiting Salvador, came to see her; according to Cardinal Lucas Moreira Neves, he said more than once that this was the suffering of the innocent, the same as the suffering of Jesus. She died in Salvador on March 13, 1992. People called her the mother of the poor and the good angel of Bahia.

Benedict XVI declared her blessed, and the beatification ceremony took place in Salvador on May 22, 2011. Pope Francis canonized her on October 13, 2019, in Saint Peter’s Square, together with John Henry Newman and three other blesseds. In Brazil she is venerated as Santa Dulce dos Pobres, Saint Dulce of the Poor.